Knowledge Management is Hard to Do Right

Although not entitled "Knowledge Management is Hard to Do Right", Knowledge Management Yesterday and Today addresses that issue through discussing all what must be done in order to successfully perform knowledge management. Unsurprisingly, most of the principles of successful knowledge management are social/political, not technical.

#5, KM benefits more from maps than models, markets than hierarchies specifically is born out by my own experiences, as the various flavors of Wikis have supplanted the highly-structured knowledge management tools of the 1990's. Wikis provide much of the benefits of the 1990's KM tools, while giving people a chance to build the knowledge structures they need. In particular, Kwiki and Socialtext (Kwiki's commercially-oriented cousin) let you create Wikis with as little or as much access control as you need (open editing of Wikis is great for Intranets but not always the greatest out on the Internet), along with much other goodness.

An important technical point not mentioned in the article is that adding knowledge to your knowledge management system must be easy really easy, not just a little bit easy. Wikitext is just about as simple as editing formatted text in ASCII can be made (kudos to Ward Cunningham). If your wiki is integrated with your other authentication systems (preferably your login authentication system), then you only have to overcome the (larger) social/political barriers to Wiki adoption to be long on your way to a successful knowledge management implementation.

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